Comments on: Coincidental spirals for your Monday pleasure

By: Messier Tidy Upper

Messier Tidy Upper — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:55:02 +0000

Wow! Splendidly magnificent indeed.

Thanks BA – for this new desktop background & a great write up too.

Mind you I’m surprised you didn’t save this for easter, with the easter-egg nestled inside an easter egg appearance of Messier 96 here. Surprised but not unhappy! Course easter is a lo-oong time away yet.

@ 13. jennyxyzzy : I think our Moon would be a wee bit too bright for the VLT to look at it – same as it is with the Hubble space observatory.

@11. Jon Hanford : Thanks. Cheers to (#10.) siravan & (#8) Peter (@polarisdotca) for their contrubutions here too.

@ 9. Chris A. : “Kudos to ESO – My initial assumption was that it was a Hubble shot.”

Yep, mine too.

By: Ian Straton

Ian Straton — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 11:35:31 +0000

@ 13,
In theory I suppose it would, however pointing an 8m mirror at the moon would fry the ccd on the recieving end so there would be no way to take a picture… putting your eye to it probably wouldn’t be a great idea either…

By: jennyxyzzy

jennyxyzzy — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 07:37:12 +0000

Hmmm, I was surprised when Phil explained that this photo was taken by an earth-bound telescope, so I went scuttling off to the VLT’s webpage, where I found this little nugget on the front page:

“With this kind of precision the VLTI can reconstruct images with an angular resolution of milliarcseconds, equivalent to distinguishing the two headlights of a car at the distance of the Moon.”

Wouldn’t that mean that the VLT is capable of seeing the moon landers/rovers? I thought we could only do that from the spacecraft that are orbiting the Moon???

By: bk_2

bk_2 — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 07:33:48 +0000

It looks to me as though the outer ring is on different plane to the inner spiral. The top is above the spiral plane, the bottom of it below. It is roughly in a plane which is tilted twenty odd degrees to the spiral’s plane. But maybe it’s just an artifact of the geometry of the outer irregular arcs.

By: Jon Hanford

Jon Hanford — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 21:35:47 +0000

M 96 has been implicated in the formation of the Leo Ring, a huge annulus of cold hydrogen gas found nearby: http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/arxiv/pdf/1005/1005.4208v2.pdf

An accompanying video shows the proposed head-on collision of M 96 with another galaxy, NGC 3384, that may have occurred over a billion years ago: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Seb2ZNqC1TY

By: siravan

siravan — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:26:37 +0000

The reddish edge-on galaxy is 2MFGC 08391 (also called 2MASX J10465229+1150201).

By: Chris A.

Chris A. — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:16:31 +0000

Kudos to ESO–My initial assumption was that it was a Hubble shot.

By: Peter (@polarisdotca)

Peter (@polarisdotca) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:06:48 +0000

Remember when NASA unveiled “The Mice”, one of the first pix from the new Hubble ACS

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap020506.html

One of my colleagues said, “Nice picture, except for those big spirals in the way…” No surprise, he’s a cosmologist!

By: Stargazer

Stargazer — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 18:48:35 +0000

Beautiful.

By: chris j.

chris j. — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 17:47:17 +0000

spiral? that inner ring looks pretty darn ring-like to me. and the irregular outer arms seem consistent with transitory arcs seen around ring galaxies as artifacts of the interaction with the other (unseen here) galaxy.